Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sapiens, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Foraging, Industry, and Human Happiness
Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture
Science, Wealth, and Empire
Human-Caused Ecological Devastation
Summary
Analysis
Harari discusses wars—for example, between the Christians and Muslims in the 1200s—to show that despite vast ideological differences, conflicting societies universally accepted and traded with money (specifically, gold coins). During the crusades, Christians even happily used coins embossed with Islamic messages, and North-African Muslims accepted taxes in the form of gold coins imprinted with pictures of the Virgin Mary. Earlier foraging societies (from 70,000 to 12,000 years ago) had no money (and few, if any, possessions). Even early farmers lived in isolated villages and tended to barter goods rather than trade in money. Harari thinks the rise of money as a globally unifying system emerged when people started establishing larger settlements, like cities.
Harari stresses that even warring societies agreed that they could trade in money, showing that money had universal appeal long before other potential imagined orders (like a set of religions values) did. Harari discusses humanity’s history before the invention of money to reinforce the idea that money (like religions, political ideas, and concepts like nations) is a fiction. It’s an idea that humans invented to facilitate mass-cooperation, which comes with its own set of rules that everybody agrees to follow (e.g., the idea that gold is worth a lot).
Themes
Even on a small, isolated scale, bartering has its drawbacks, Harari notes that an apple grower might struggle to calculate how many shoes (from the cobbler) a basket of apples is worth, and the two may disagree about how to make that calculation. Harari thinks money, in contrast, is a much more efficient way to facilitate trade and exchange. To Harari, it was “a purely mental revolution,” in which people realized they can use something (including shells, salt, cigarettes, coins, promissory notes, and more) to represent the value of something else. Harari thinks ninety percent of today’s money only exists on computer servers. To Harari, money unifies humanity because everybody trusts in the idea that everybody else wants money.
Harari emphasizes once more that money is a “purely mental” (but very powerful) human invention by showing that any object can be used as money as long as people agree on its value. This reinforces the idea that money is more of an idea than an actual thing, because it shows that the objects (like coins or shells) change, but the concept persists. Nonetheless, money is an effective fiction: it convinces all of humanity to agree that something is valuable and trust that everybody else will too. This, to Harari, facilitates mass cooperation and establishes money as the world’s most powerful imagined order.
Themes
Universal trust in the value of money enabled diverse and distinct human cultures to morph into a unified economic domain. Harari thinks money is so powerful as a unifying global idea because it’s a simple one. Religions demand that people believe in a complex set of codes, while money, as a concept, only asks people to agree that something—anything, whether its gold or electronic transactions—is universally valuable. Even though many people consider money to be “the root of all evil,” Harari thinks it represents widespread human tolerance. It does, however, have a dark side. Money doesn’t encourage people to trust other humans, but to trust money itself—which leads them to do things like sell people into slavery.
Harari emphasizes that money, like all fictions, establishes hierarchies aren’t necessarily fair to the people who believe in and rally around their rules. Yet even people who acknowledge this (by calling money “evil”) still use it and abide by the global economy’s rules. Harari subtly hints that if people don’t want to be oppressed by the world’s prevailing imagined orders, they need to invent a new imagined order that will make people cooperate on the global scale as effectively as money does.
Themes
